"Seizure of Crimea by the modern vandals provoked a fair indignation of the world community," is said in the letter published оn LRCF website. "The outstanding chess players Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik expressed their indignation with the fact together with the civilized world. We support attitudeof the grandmaster Mikhail Golubev of Odessa and the initiatives like "chess on Maidan" organised by him, we are also very thankful to Garry Kasparov for his support of Ukraine. We also support the letterof Ukrainian chess players "for sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine" and we are surprised to know that some of the GMs they are planning to play at the Russian team championship in April didn't sign the petition."

In addition "some outstanding players have been captured by the chaovinistic Russian propaganda, among such are 12th world champion Anatoly Karpov, Alisa Galliamova and former Ukrainian citizen Sergey Karjakin, who even defiantly stated that his motherland emigrated to Russia following his example,

Russian chaovinists like to refer to 1954 when Crimea was passed to Ukraine by Russia, however, they sheepishly forget to recall that Russia got Taganrog with all bordering territories, overall area equal to the size of Crimean desert, in exchange. The so called "referendum" held in Crimea, to which Karpov and Karjakin refer, violates Ukrainian Constitution and International law, and that was confirmed by the Venice Commission and UN General Assembly."

Following this LRCF asks to declare these three citizens of Russia persona non grata for all chess events in Lviv and also asks other federations of the country to support the idea.

We got a commentary of the member of LRCF presidium Adrian Mikhalchishin:

"I would like to stress that this is an initiative to declare those people persona non grata in chess life of Ukraine, but not in any other sense.

As we know FIDE slogan is "Gens una sumus." We all have to follow it and live in accordance to it. We love our great game and we love all those playing it. That's why we should be trying to avoid supporting political decisions which may be clearly unfair towards others. The great Botvinnik understood it at full, because he wanted to play the match against Alekhine despite the complete difference in their political views.

And it hurts when some great chess players so enthusiastically support the idea of partition of Ukraine. Maybe tomorrow they will gush in admiration seeing "khokhols and banderas" being killed. Have we done anything bad to them? How can we be welcoming them here or how can we be visiting them there?

The scariest thing is that making these two nations enemies is beneficial for someone.

It also hurt when Kasparov supported an aggression against the most chess playing country of Jugoslavia. We believed and still believe that the great chess players should be supporting friendly relationship between chess players around the world."

On the FIDE website, Kirsan Illyumzhinov has replied to various recent statements by Garry Kasparov. We would remind you that in one of his comments, Kasparov reacted to Illyumzhinov's visit to Lviv and the subsequent decision to hold the women's world championship match in that city. In Kasparov's opinion, Illyumzhinov thereby was taking part in a special operation for Vladimir Putin.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has commented on the story regarding Garry Kasparov's exclusion from the list of champions of the sports society Spartak. In a live interview with Pavel Lobkov on the TV channel "Dozhd," the head of FIDE called the act of censorship "unfair", "wrong" and agreed that it was a political decision.